J. Edgar Hoover - who
covered up his black ancestry

"Not all slave
masters abused their slaves - Some actually treated them
like family and bore children by them, like the
Mississippi plantation owner, William Hoover. He had
eight children by my Great Grandmother, Elizabeth Allen.
One of those children was my Grandfather William Allen,
and one was his brother, Ivery Hoover, who later had one
son; J. Edgar." Millie McGhee,
author of Secrets Uncovered, J Edgar Hoover - Passing For
White?

A new book entitled Secrets
Uncovered, J Edgar Hoover - Passing For White? has been
published revealing that J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI
for most of its early history from 1924 until his death in
1972, had black ancestors. The author, Millie McGhee is an
African-American who says she was told as a little girl in
McComb, Mississippi, USA, of her familles links with Hoover,
described by the author Edward Spannaus, his article
The
Mysterious Origins of J. Edgar
Hoover as "one of
the most virulent racists to hold a top government position"
in the USA in the 20th century.

She says that her grandfather
told of her of a "very powerful" man in Washington who was
related to the family but did not want the links to be known
and passed himself off as white. She reveals in her book
that this man was Hoover, who was born in 1895, was
apparently anxious that no one should know of his black
origins.

McGhee, a former teacher in Los
Angeles, contacted a genealogist in Salt Lake City, Utah,
for help in tracing her family's history back over 200
years. Her research shows that Hoover's grandfather and
great-grandfather lived in a segregated black area of
Washington and were once classified in a census as
"coloured". In the search of census records into the family
of his father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover (who died in 1921
after a long illness) both the Hoover and Naylor families
were living in areas of Washington D.C. - then itself a
mostly segregated city - where blacks and whites were listed
as living in close proximity. Some of the white Hoover
families had blacks living with them, not as servants, but
blacks being of the same occupation, such as "butcher'' or
"clerk.'' There are also alterations and other oddities in a
number of the Hoover family census records, and also in the
racial listings which were then included in census
records.

According to McGhee, her
relatives were warned of "dire consequences" if they spoke
publicly of his background. She said that as a little girl
she believed that they would be killed if they mentioned the
secret.

"Is this man so
ashamed of his race that he would spend his whole life
passing for white? . . . How has our race offended him
?"

She says that his obsession
with the assassinated Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X, stemmed in part from a repressed anger
about his secret life. Apparently, although members of the
Hoover family have contacted her and said that they are not
angry about the disclosures, McGhee's own family were
unhappy with her decision to go public, as, understandably,
they never wanted to be associated with him.

According to Spannaus,
apparently it was well-known both inside and outside the
FBI, that there were rumours about Hoover's possible black
ancestry - which were widespread during his long reign.
There were also reports that Hoover deployed the FBI to
track down who was behind rumours of his black ancestry -
just as he did regarding rumours and reports about his
homosexuality. The American writer Gore Vidal, who grew up
in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, told the writer Anthony
Summers that when:

"Hoover was
becoming famous, and it was always said of him - in my
family and around the city - that he was mulatto. People
said he came from a family that had "passed.' It was the
word they used for people of black origin who, after
generations of inbreeding, have enough white blood to
pass themselves off as white. That's what was always said
about Hoover.'' (Anthony Summers, Official and
Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover,
1993).

Summers also found evidence
that blacks referred to Hoover as "some kind of spook'' and
even "soul brother,'' and realized that in some black
communities in the eastern part of the USA, it was generally
believed that Edgar had black roots. Hoover's ancestry was
always a subject of speculation within the FBI, because of
his lack of documented heritage that was always required
when someone joined the FBI. Wesley Swearingen, a former FBI
Special Agent (from 1951 to 1977), and author of the 1995
book FBI Secrets: An Agent's Exposé, said that
it was always viewed as a mystery the lack of documented
evidence on Hoover's background:

"Because for all
the FBI agents, they'd go back and check everything about
your family, your relatives, and everything else, to make
sure they're squeaky clean . . . and here, the Director,
and nobody knows really where he came from . . . agents
would get into topics like that where they on a
surveillance or something, when they finished the
crossword puzzle, and had nothing else to do, and they'd
start talking about Hoover . . . all the agents would get
onto the subject of his real tight hair, his tight, wirey
hair, and speculation that maybe there was a little
hanky-panky in his family . . . and then his facial
characteristics were really unusual"

Spannaus has done excellent
research himself, which along with McGhee, have also
confirmed that there are substantial discrepancies
concerning Hoover's early biography. He observes how:

Strikingly, there
does not appear to be {any} contemporaneous record of
Edgar's birth in Washington. Hoover's own
autobiographical account - on which virtually all
biographers have relied - states that he was born January
1, 1895, at his parents' home on Seward Square, in the
Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with a
physician, Dr. Mallan, in attendance.

However, despite the fact
that it was legally required to report a birth to the
District of Columbia Health Department, and that this had
been done for the first two children born in the family
(Dickerson, Jr. and Lillian), there was no certificate of
birth filed for Edgar by Dr. Mallan.

The entry for John Edgar
Hoover in the Washington D.C. index of births was clearly
added at a much later date, and the certificate number
contains the suffix "D'' - signifying a delayed
filing.

Thus Spannaus obtained a
certified copy of Edgar's actual birth certificate - which
was not filed until 1938, when Hoover was 43 years old ! The
verification of birth is provided by an affidavit executed
by Edgar's older brother Dickerson N. Hoover, Jr., who
states that he was present when Edgar was born, and that he
himself was 15 years old at the time. Oddly, Dickerson's
affidavit does not mention a doctor being present, in
contrast to Edgar's own account. He found out that,
curiously, Hoover had never applied for a birth certificate
until after his mother's death in February 1938. It seems
obvious that his mother Annie Hoover - if she in fact was
his mother - would have been by far the best witness, rather
than a 15-year-old boy.

The writer Anthony Summers,
described Hoover as "the offspring of a disturbed father and
an ambitious mother.'' Apparently the relationship to his
father, Dickerson Naylor Hoover, was virtually non-existent.
He was never known to have ever spoken about his father even
to his closest friends. His relationship with his mother
however, was one of extreme dependency. As a child, he was
described as "high-strung", "sickly", and even "excessively
fearful'' by relatives. He was said to have a terror of
separation from his mother, whom he lived with until her
death in 1938. As Spannaus notes:

"Of course, were it
the case that Edgar had already been separated from his
real mother at an early age, and Annie Hoover was
actually his adoptive or surrogate mother, this
psychological profile would be entirely consistent with
such a scenario"

Spannaus also found indications
that his Dickerson and Naylor ancestors (through Hoover's
paternal grandmother) were involved in a post-Civil War
"underground railroad'' which was used to assist
light-skinned blacks to make the transition from black
society to white society. (An academic study cited in
McGhee's book, reports that more than three-quarters of
African-Americans have some white ancestry, and that at
least 23% of white Americans have an African-American
element in their background.)

Hoover's obsession with
fighting those who were struggling for black liberation from
was an state of apartheid in the USA up until the 1960's is
well-known. For example, in 1956, in the wake of the US
Supreme Court's decision to end segregation of black and
white children in schools, Hoover fought with Attorney
General Brownell over his proposals for new civil rights
laws and enforcement provisions. Hoover declared that "the
specter of racial intermarriage'' was behind the tensions
over "mixed schooling,'' and he on one hand attacked the
civil rights organizations, while defending and praising the
racist and Ku Klux Klan supporting White Citizens Councils
in the South. It was also in 1956 that Hoover launched the
FBI's COINTELPRO
(Counter-Intelligence Programme) which targeted civil rights
groups and leaders, among others. Hoover's FBI was literally
an unofficial extension of the illegal racist groups that
were burning down Black churches in the South and lynching
Black people - At the time of Hoover's death in 1972, blacks
still constituted less than 1% of FBI special agents. In the
early 1960s, one FBI agent reported that:

"In about 90% of
the situations in which Bureau personnel referred to
Negroes, the word 'Nigger' was used and always in a very
derogatory manner.'' (Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy
and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1987, p.
367).

While at George Washington
University in 1917, Hoover had became active in what is
politely called the "Southern Fraternity,'' the Kappa Alpha
Order - according to Spannaus others have likened it to the
"college auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan". His "official"
mother, Annie Hoover was the honorary "housemother'' for
Kappa Alpha at George Washington University, and Hoover
remained active in it for the rest of his life. Many of his
closest associates at the FBI were also Kappa Alpha members.
Ironically, Hoover's remarkable career path would
undoubtedly never have been possible, had it been known to
have had black ancestry in his family background. In the
decade of his birth, so-called Jim Crow laws were
re-instituted through the South. Under the infamous
Democratic Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (when Hoover began
his career in the Justice Department), segregation was
reinstituted throughout the Federal civil service, which had
been exempted from Jim Crow laws. And under the prevailing
"one drop'' rule, any amount of black blood or ancestry
would exclude a person from most positions or careers - and
certainly from high government positions.

Hoover had first waged a
campaign against Marcus Garvey and the black nationalist
movement from 1919 to 1923. He launched the infamous
campaign to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King when in 1957,
Hoover ordered the FBI to monitor King and his Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, when it began a campaign to
register eligible black voters in the racist South.
Throughout his life in the 1960's before he was murdered by
persons unknown suspected of working for the US government,
the FBI ruthlessly targeted King. Thus, it is no surprise
that when the news came through over the radio that King had
been killed shot in Memphis on April 4th, 1968 there were
jubilant cries of "They got the SOB!'' that reverberated
through the Atlanta FBI office. One former FBI agent
recalled another agent shouting "We finally got the son of a
bitch!'' (Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the
Secrets, 1991, p. 606; Anthony Summers, Official and
Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993,
p. 364). Hoover's FBI also waged an total war against other
Black liberation figures such as Malcolm X and the Black
Panthers - 38 of whom were killed in suspicious
circumstances.

It is clear that McGhee's book
has contributed substantially to understanding the complex
figure of J. Edgar Hoover - we can only wait and wonder now
if the FBI will change it's official history to reflect a
more accurate picture of his life and his time as the head
of FBI when it ruthlessly attempted to crush the black
liberation struggle. He is certainly a person who does not
deserve to have public buildings and institutions named him.